Cossacks

The Cossacks arose on the wild steppe frontier between Muscovy, Poland-Lithuania, and the Tatar khanates — free communities of runaway serfs, adventurers, and borderers who built self-governing hosts along the Dnieper and the Don from the fifteenth century. Their name, from the Turkic for 'free man,' was the whole idea: no lord, elected atamans, and war as livelihood.

Cossack warfare was light cavalry mastery: raid, scout, screen, pursue. The lance and the guardless shashka saber were the classic arms, with firearms always and everywhere; their river fleets raided the Black Sea coasts of the Ottoman Empire in oared chaiky. The Zaporozhian Sich became legend — Repin's painting of their obscene letter to the Sultan enshrines the swagger — and the Khmelnytsky rising of 1648 redrew Eastern Europe.

The tsars bought what they could not tame: land and privileges for hereditary military service, and by the nineteenth century a dozen registered hosts guarded and expanded the empire from the Caucasus to the Pacific, their sotnias the empire's police and its most famous cavalry. Napoleon's retreating Grande Armée was eaten alive by them. Revolution and civil war shattered the hosts — Bolshevik 'de-Cossackization' was near-annihilation — yet the identity survived to revive, contentiously, in post-Soviet Russia.

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